


La Folia

by Schgain



Series: The Deft Bowman [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: :(, Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-09 23:43:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10424460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schgain/pseuds/Schgain
Summary: Death is not the end. Death is an ocean on all sides of our lives. Deep and dark and cold, and anything but empty.---Johan meets Death. It goes okay, all things considered.





	

**Author's Note:**

> hey? hey? FUCK griffin, in particular
> 
> kudos/comments greatly appreciated!
> 
>  
> 
> [ Now with art!](https://twitter.com/curly_tsunami/status/845756856035393538/photo/1)

People say death is cold.

Well they sure as _shit_ got that one right. Coldness seeps into Johan's fabric, weighing him down. He can't swim up with his skirt and weighted clothes, with magnets sewn into the hems. The water is a wonderful pinkblueblackpurple with pinpricks of brilliant white. The color is muddied as the blood from his wound clouds around him. 

Somewhere far off, he hears something singing. 

Johan, being who he is, opens his eyes- both of them, even the jacked up pinkblueblackpurple one with the pinpricks of brilliant white where sclera and pupil and iris should be. The Voidfish, singing-- only it's not a song. It's a screech. 

It reaches out one long ribbonlike oral arm towards him, and he stares with glassy eyes as it's yanked back. Or maybe it recoils. Johan can't shake the awful sinking feeling that he'd failed.

He's also literally sinking too.

The Voidfish sings. 

Johan opens his mouth to sing back.

Johan opens his mouth

And inhales water

The wound across his front doesn't kill him

(It probably wouldn't have)

He drowns. 

People say death is cold. 

Johan sits up with a gasp that doesn't fill his lungs with air. The gasp burns his throat, like trying to breathe after a long run on a very brisk winter day, or like trying to breathe in the low atmosphere environment of the Bureau's few areas not covered by domes. 

"Easy," says a voice. Low and accented and smooth. It's nicer than it should be. "easy." There's a hand on Johan's arm and honestly there should be no reason for anyone's hands to be on Johan, but really he's just trying to figure out the whole existence thing. 

Johan's eye hurts. He leans forward and vomits up stardust.

"Ew," says the voice, quietly.

"Sorry," says Johan reflexively. There's a stinging pain in his face, like someone drove a railway spike into his right eye. It's a familiar pain, though. Johan takes more comfort in it than anything else, even when he reaches his hand up to touch and finds it too is leaking stardust.

He laughs, despite himself, and finally looks at his companion.

A man, strikingly handsome, with soft facial features and a strange covering of plumage over the frame of his face. His eyes are impenetrably red in the darkness of their environment. He recoils slightly when he sees the mess that is Johan's face. 

"Does it look bad?" he jokes.

"No," says the stranger, after a telling hesitation. 

Johan chuckles. "Uh. Hi. Sorry to drop in. I think I'm dead?" 

"Yes," says the stranger, "you are. My terrible condolences. Though I have no idea how you managed to come here, of all places." 

Johan shrugs. "I kinda have a way of like, getting around loopholes and generally messing with the fundamental laws of the universe. Voidfish privileges, I think. Uhhhh. I'm Johan."

"Kravitz." Kravitz holds out his hand. Johan hesitates a second too long, and he drops it somewhat awkwardly. "Well... Welcome to the Astral Plane. I'd offer to show you around, but.... things have really gone to shit, if I'm being honest. You and I are the only ones here." 

Johan's eyebrows shoot up. "In the whole plane?"

"There's... something out there. It's..." Kravitz' voice flutters in tempo with the tremors of his gesticulating hand. "I nearly drowned in it."

"Oh." says Johan. "I did." 

Kravitz starts. "It's in the Material Plane already?!"

"I mean I _did_ drown, is all. I think... Maybe? I got attacked by nothing, and then when I died, I saw Magnus, and some shadow things Magnus was fighting." He rubs his bad eye with the heel of his palm, and it comes off covered in more sparklies. It'd make a pretty makeup color, if he weren't. Y'know.

Kravitz wails. Johan is faced with the uncomfortable fact that most people don't take despair as a baseline with which to judge all other experiences. He pulls his knees to his chest and hugs them. "I'm sorry," he says.

"No, no..." Kravitz fiddles with the scattered feathers across the floor in what Johan thinks might be a halfhearted attempt to tidy a bit. "I am simply... Not used to being out of the loop. And I feel like if people told me things, I would be more help to people."

Nausea roils in Johan. Which is weird, because he's dead. He shouldn't feel anything now that he's dead, and now he feels everything. 

"It's like a lie by omission," Johan agrees. "and at the end of it you can't help but know you could've done more, and you feel like hey, maybe you didn't have to wind up as a pathetic failure, and you did anyways." Glitter from his bad eye drips onto his skirt.

Kravitz puts his hand back on Johan. "Come now, there's no... Look. Things are really looking shitassed, aren't they? But there are people out there-- competent people-- who know what they're doing. A whole bureau of them." 

"I know," Johan sniffles, wiping tears away. "I worked for them." 

"Oh." says Kravitz. He says it again, with finality that Johan doesn't care for. " _Oh._ "

A moment's silence passes. It might not be as long as John Cage's Four Thirty-Three, but it certainly feels like it. Maybe death is just a long series of concurrent eternities. 

"So then the Bureau is..."

"Fucked."

"I was going to say taking direct action, but..." Kravitz sighs. "There's nothing we can do from here for them for now. So let's focus on what we can do."

Johan thinks. "I'm really good at... depression naps, and counting how many things are in a space just by looking at them. And I can play violin, harp, and piano." 

Kravitz brightens. Quite literally, too- his eyes shimmer scarlet. "Music! Marvelous! You know, I always wanted to be a conductor. Would it be too much trouble to ask you to play something? Things have been awfully... Bleak lately." 

"Can I summon my violin here?" asks Johan.

His host nods. "Certainly."

"Isn't that like. Against the rules."

He laughs, somewhat sheepishly, into his fist. "I'd daresay not a soul here is really reinforcing those rules. And if it's a soulbound instrument... Well, you're still very much a soul."

Johan casts Summon Instrument as quick as blinking. It's the pink pastel violin with the holographic stickers on it. It's ugly, and it's very loved. 

Kravitz leans forwards, entranced, as Johan puts his bow on the string.

For the first time in... Well, in forever, the halls of the Eternal Stockade are full of life. Johan straightens his back first, then takes a knee, and before long he's standing up, filling the marble halls with the intense, rich notes of [La Folia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGET78mPMCA). 

And for the moment after, filled with Kravitz' uproarious applause, he feels like maybe he wouldn't mind staying as The Deft Bowman.


End file.
